Opal Loop, Son of Gone Fishin’ and a world premiere from Trisha Brown Dance

The Trisha Brown Dance Company has been without Trisha Brown for over a decade, and while it continues to preserve and present her pioneering postmodern work, in recent years it has turned to new creators to expand on her legacy. This season at New York’s Joyce Theater, the commission went to Lee Serle, an Australian choreographer whom Brown had mentored under the high-profile Rolex mentoring programme in 2010-2011 and who subsequently danced with her company.

Serle has harnessed the breezy fluidity of Brown’s movement in the work he titled Time again, and added a sense of ritual and a suggestion of narrative about the precarity of shelter, with the aid of visual designs by a frequent collaborator, Colombian artist Mateo López. Loose, easy moves suggest dancers blown about by winds but never thrown entirely off-balance; these are punctuated by thrusting, jabbing, twisting, wriggling motions and staggered slumps to the ground – all beautifully executed by an ensemble of seven. Stretches of contemplative stillness felt as potent as the movement, bathed in a whimsical sonic landscape by Alisdair Macindoe that layered sounds of bird calls, dripping water, a deep hollow drone, possibly of a didgeridoo, percussive wood-block rhythms and faint echoes of what sounded like human voices, arguing. Rapid-fire pinging sounds, like those heard on shoot-’em-up video games, later animated the score, to ambiguously comic or ominous effect.

Less compelling was the maneuvering of set pieces created by López – sculpted panels constructed of a rough natural fibre with arched cutouts for doorways. The dancers lifted, tilted, rolled, hooked and unhooked these panels into various configurations until they finally made a small enclosure lit by a bare light bulb which descended from the flies. The apparent fragility of the panels implied that shelter is hard to come by for this community, but the slow-motion manipulation of these props felt tedious and trite.

López has created imaginative art installations around the subject of home and migration; the choreography could have plumbed such a theme with more depth. Connections could also have been made to whatever inspired the design of the colorblocked clothing, which featured some symbols and lettering. Sometimes a sense of mystery in dance is exhilarating. Sometimes it’s just a mystery.

On the same program, Brown’s Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503 from 1980 and Son of Gone Fishin’ from 1981, with their inventory of buoyant movement phrases accumulated, stretched out, interjected, sped up, slowed down, unraveled, flipped and passed between dancers in a never-ending cascade (well, almost never-ending: I counted two brief pauses in Son of Gone Fishin’), provoked much rapture and lowered our collective blood pressure.

In Opal Loop, the dancers in silky garments, like angels from varied orders, dash around on errands that may have something to do with saving humanity. Wild, insouciant movement that often sent legs swinging one way while head, shoulders and arms went another made these dancers appear airborne. Their floppy leaps filled me with inexplicable joy. When they crossed paths, they pumped their arms in a celestial version of a high-five. Ashley Merker, Patrick Needham and Spencer Weidie were intense, while Jennifer Payán, in dark opalescent silk, her movement loose-limbed yet incisive, shot ironic looks over her shoulder.

Merker, Needham and Weidie were joined by Savannah Gaillard, Burr Johnson, Cecily Campbell and Rochelle Jamila for Son of Gone Fishin’. There were fleeting pairings, more distinct than in Opal Loop. In a particularly elegant and affecting move, Merker would drape herself momentarily over Johnson's back as he lunged forward, as if offering her a place to rest. Similar acknowledgements of community manifested in companionable shoulder bumps and a steadying hand extended to a neighbor. In the poignant close, the ensemble darted upstage, their backs to us, and assumed a ‘broken wing’ pose before blackout. 

The ordinary became extraordinary, even unearthly, in Brown’s choreography. But the stage settings for these two iconic pieces at the Joyce stripped them of some of their sorcery. Japanese fog artist Fujiko Nakaya’s vapor ‘cloud’ for Opal Loop, in and out of which the dancers used to drift, has morphed into rather ordinary smoke effects largely confined to a narrow trough that runs against the back wall of the stage. Similarly, the massive canvas drops in deeply saturated blues and greens designed by Donald Judd for Son of Gone Fishin’ have vanished; in their place, a weak lighting scheme cast the back wall of the stage in a queasy pale greenish light.

Brown was famous for staging work in unconventional settings – in abandoned warehouses, down the side of buildings, on rafts in bodies of water – and that tradition has continued. Future revivals of her work in proscenium settings deserve more inventive stagecraft.